Lenovo ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4 Review

Lenovo’s ThinkPad L series is a step above its entry-level E series, offering a metal chassis and enterprise security options for less than the mainstream T or elite X1 series. The ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4 (starts at $1,502.99; $1,699.99 as tested) is a 2-in-1 convertible that gets the basics down pat, including the excellent input devices ThinkPads are known for, long battery life, and both a bundled stylus pen and a niche or garage to store it. This corporate fleet-focused model’s pricing, however, doesn’t make sense for consumers, who are better off with the company’s more feature-rich and better-performing ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8.

The Design: Classic ThinkPad, But Convertible

The ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4 is technically the brand’s entry-level convertible since there is no E series 2-in-1. Its pricing hardly seems entry-level, though, at least if you’re buying a single unit without the bulk discount of an enterprise IT department. Lenovo was selling the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 for almost the exact price of our L13 Yoga ($1,670) at this writing. The company’s prices fluctuate weekly, so keep an eye out for sales.

The L13 Yoga starts with the classic black ThinkPad chassis, squared off and looking like its siblings. Only its 360-degree screen hinges give away its convertible functionality.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Lightweight aluminum helps the convertible meet our ultraportable qualification at 2.91 pounds. The metal makes a pleasant scratchy sound when I run my fingers across it. Like all ThinkPads, the L13 Yoga meets the Department of Defense’s MIL-STD 810H standards for durability, though the chassis showed some more flex than I expected when I torqued it by its corners. The lid is sufficiently rigid, but the hinges are too stiff for it to be opened one-handed.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

At 0.7 by 12 by 8.6 inches (HWD), the ThinkPad L13 Yoga is normally sized for a 13.3-inch convertible with 16:10 aspect ratio display. Its screen bezels are on the thick side compared to high-end clamshell laptops’, but a 2-in-1 needs some extra room so your thumbs don’t touch the screen when holding the device in tablet mode.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This ThinkPad’s I/O selection satisfies with two USB Type-C ports (one Thunderbolt 4 and one USB 3.2), two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and an HDMI 2.1 video output. Either USB-C port serves to charge the laptop with the included 45-watt adapter. Models with optional mobile broadband (ours wasn’t one) add a SIM card slot on the left edge. Our test unit had Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, though Wi-Fi 6E is listed as an option.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Security features include a Kensington nano lock slot on the right edge and a biometric fingerprint reader built into the power button; our system lacked the optional IR face-recognition webcam. The 1080p picture from the webcam centered above the display is adequately sharp for casual calls. IT departments will appreciate the availability of processors with Intel’s vPro remote management tech, as well as the L13 Yoga’s Eco Star certification.

Using the ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4: Display and Input Devices

The ThinkPad L13 Yoga’s IPS touch screen checks the boxes for productive purposes but not much else. Text was readable to my eyes at its 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution with Windows’ default 125% scaling. You won’t find higher-resolution or OLED options on this model as you will on the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, but I found the picture satisfactory for general work and the occasional movie. The space scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope showed good black levels, and the desert scenes on Tatooine were plenty bright.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The glossy screen surface works well with the included pen, which recharges when stashed in its garage on the right side of the chassis. It can be coaxed out with a fingernail or a coin. The skinny stylus takes some getting used to if you’re coming from a real ink pen.

As with most convertible notebooks, tablet mode is a secondary feature of a PC destined to spend most of its time in laptop mode. I never quite get comfortable feeling the exposed (but deactivated) keyboard beneath my fingers, or the gap between the chassis and the folded-back screen. The Microsoft Surface Pro 9 is a much better choice if you’re after a tablet-first device.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The ThinkPad keyboard sure works wonders in laptop mode, though. Its wonderful tactile feedback, precise layout (with real Home, End, Insert, and Delete keys along the top row plus properly separated arrow keys), and two-level white backlighting leave no room for criticism. I scored a respectable (for me) 112 words per minute with 98% accuracy on my first try in the MonkeyType typing test.

Nor do I harbor any complaints about the smooth surface and tactile clicks of the touchpad. The ThinkPad trademark eraser-head pointing stick and its three mouse buttons are also present and accounted for.

Entertainment value from the L13 Yoga’s speakers is questionable; vocals were clear enough in Matchbox Twenty’s “Real World,” but the overall sound was strained and not loud enough for more than personal listening. Bass is almost nonexistent, as I found when firing up JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late.” The speakers are tuned by Dolby but lack the Dolby Atmos support of the much-better-sounding ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8.

Preloaded software is minimal, as you’d expect on a business machine. Lenovo Vantage combines system updates, Wi-Fi security, and various settings including the option to swap the Fn and Ctrl keys at lower left and assign a custom function to the F12 key. Windows 11 Pro and a lengthy three-year warranty are standard.

Testing the ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4: Basic Performance But Little Else

Our ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4 (model 21FJ002DUS) retails for $1,669.99 from CDW. It combines an Intel Core i7-1355U processor (10 cores, up to 5.0GHz turbo), Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, 16GB of non-user-upgradeable LPDDR5-6400 memory, and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive.

Availability seemed limited at review time; CDW listed only one other model, a $1,635 config with a vPro-equipped Core i5-1345U chip. I also found a non-vPro Core i5-1335U model for $1,502 from Newegg. The laptop wasn’t available when I checked the Lenovo website; the page hinted at other ThinkPad L13 Yoga models including an AMD version and ones in Storm Gray instead of matte black, but I didn’t find them for sale.

Our performance comparison charts include three other convertibles. The Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1 and Lenovo’s own ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 both sport Core i7 CPUs, while the HP Spectre x360 14 uses a new Intel Core Ultra processor. I also added the clamshell Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED for a little variety.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The ThinkPad L13 Yoga trailed in all tests. It wasn’t far behind the Zenbook in PCMark 10, but the X1 Yoga did considerably better with the same hardware, especially in the CPU tests, suggesting it may have better cooling. The Spectre’s Core Ultra 7 CPU is simply in a different league, but that was to be expected (for one thing, it runs at 28 watts versus the others’ 15 watts).

To its credit, the L13 Yoga provides ample everyday performance. It felt snappy and responsive when I ran office apps and browsed the web with multiple tabs. Its single cooling fan rarely activates, and its chassis remains at about room temperature even under load.

Graphics Tests

We test laptops’ and desktops’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The L13 Yoga’s numbers show for the thousandth time that Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics are sufficient for general use but not much else. This isn’t a gaming machine, that’s for sure. The HP’s newer Intel Arc IGP was easily the fastest in the group.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops’ and tablets’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Though it didn’t take top honors, the little Yoga’s 14 hours of unplugged runtime is very respectable for an ultraportable convertible, certainly more than enough to venture from home without the AC adapter. That said, its display was rather dim at our 50% brightness setting, so you may want to crank it up, which will consume more power.

The L13 Yoga’s screen isn’t anything special. Its colors were nicely saturated, if predictably not as vivid as the OLED panels of the Asus and HP, but its peak brightness is just average.

Verdict: There Are Better Business Convertibles

“Average” is a good word for the ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 4: While its excellent keyboard, long battery life, and standard pen are standouts, everything else merely checks the boxes, with a screen that doesn’t try hard enough and no special features to speak of. Nor is it a speedy performer, though it’s perfectly fine for the likes of Word and Excel. Corporate buyers getting volume discounts will probably find more to like about it, but for the rest of us, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8 is easily a better option, offering stronger performance and superior features at about the same cost.